Abstract:
This paper explores the use of a wiki as a tool for developing literacies that initiate, implement, and sustain transformative educational and social change in preservice teachers, world language methods courses, teacher preparation programs, and the K-12 schools they serve. The wiki became a mediating tool that drew my "technology pedagogical content knowledge" (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) into a single actionable frame, helping me to consider my students’ perspectives more carefully. It also spurred me to consider issues of curriculum, authority, access, ethics, knowledge, and power more critically in the process. The more we used the wiki, the more I found myself relinquishing power and authority, questioning my own pedagogy, and understanding how intimately related products, practices, and perspectives are in the development of professional identity. The experience transformed my teaching and what it was possible for my students to learn.
Note: This link will take you to a wiki created especially for classroom teachers that contains a multimedia summary of the major sections of this paper: World Language Wikis
This started off as a summary, but appears to have disintegrated into yet another parts pile. One day I'll come clean it up, but for now, enjoy the first few sections and then recognize that the rest are more or less an abandoned playground.
The Problem:
Teaching is complex
Students get lost in the layers of the system that we use to try to structure and control the complexity
Artifacts produced by these practices situate knowledge as an object, people as problems, and questions as answers
All practice is culturally situated. In order to change the practice, one must change the culture
Sometimes, changing the culture means changing the structures in which the practices occur
Wikis are a tool that have the potential to help restructure practice
The Questions:
Background - What does it mean to be literate and why should world language educators care?
Clarifications - How does a wiki differ from a website or a blog?
Functions - How do wikis work and what can language educators do with them?
Teacher Preparation - What do wikis have to do with world language methods courses?
Language Links - How might a wiki be used in a world language methods course?
Transformations - In what ways might the tensions inherent in wiki use highlight possible sites for the transformation of learning, teaching, and professional development?
Student Comments - What do teacher candidates think of working with a wiki?
Assessment - How might one use the interactive features of a wiki for assessment purposes?
References - Where might one go to further explore the use of wikis in world language education?
Resources - What resources will be most helpful to novices in creating wikis of their own?
Summary - What are the key points of this article?
Background:
The convergence of emerging technologies, the global expansion of social networks, and the rapid development and diffusion of innovations they make possible have changed the sociocultural fabric of our society
As the fabric of society changes, so does the definition of what it means to function successfully within it (i.e., literacy)
In spite of expanding definitions of literacy, schools are slow to change
Wikis have the potential to support the development of 21st Century literacies
Changes:
The digitization of information has changed writing spaces and tools
As writing tools and spaces change, those that are less efficient and effective will be transformed or completely replaced, rendering them obsolete
This calls for a change in the literacy pedagogies and practices of schools
Such changes are likely to create substantive disruptions in the ways people think, work, and learn
Definitions:
A wiki is a type of social software that allows multiple people to easily and collaboratively create, edit, discuss, and share multimedia content online using a web browser.
Wiki use already spans many domains and purposes
The growing importance of wikis in the professional world, combined with their potential to facilitate communication, support collaboration, and foster the development of community, makes them especially worthy of the attention of educators.
Clarifications:
The Pedagogy of Implementation - What distinguishes a website from a wiki is less about the technology itself and more about the kind of access, communication, interaction, and thinking the inherent features of each technology promotes, as well as the “pedagogy” of its implementation in a community of users.
Website – Presentational Communication - Centralized, often controlled by a single “expert” person, users access information from a central point. Users generally do not contribute content or access other users, and if they do, it is usually only through the webmaster, who maintains sole control over the structure of the site. Frequently requires specialized knowledge to design and maintain.
Blog - Interpretive Communication - Comments feature allows for readers to engage in interpersonal conversations with the author, but does not grant them the ability to change the original content or structure of the site.
Wiki – Interpersonal Communication - Decentralized (depending on “pedagogy” of its implementation), users have access to other users, users contribute content and perspective, and can even change structure of the site. Point and click editing and uploading, RSS feeds available too (which changes the kinds of interactions users can have with the site, and the site’s ability to access users—pull v. push technology). Hence, wikis simultaneously yield the presentational affordances of a traditional website, the interpretive possibilities inherent in a blog, and the intense level of interpersonal engagement that other emerging social technologies make possible--all in one package.
Functions:
Functions include:
A multimedia, random access repository of knowledge, skills, expertise
Administrative tasks (communication, dissemination of information, organization)
Articulation across cohorts and courses
Brainstorming
Collaborative design and development of content and transliteracy skills
Collaborative grant writing
Community outreach, parental involvement, and program advocacy
In order to address these concerns in practical ways that take into account the sociocultural changes in our society, shifts in perspective, pedagogy, and practice are required
Teacher Preparation:
Alignment (of content, pedagogy, purpose, and context) - What would building stronger relationships between what we teach, how we teach, why we teach, and where we teach make it possible for teacher candidates to see, experience, and understand about the learning and living of their students?
CONTENT - How do we align methods course assignments, classroom practices (in the field), and scholarly perspectives? How do we model the alignment of multiple sets of standards? [K-12 standards with professional standards (TPCK – technology, pedagogy, content)]
PEDAGOGY & TECHNOLOGY - How do we align what we believe about pedagogically sound uses of technology with practice?
KNOWLEDGE - How do we engage teacher-candidates with the profession at large in authentic and meaningful ways? (Knowledge becomes meaningful when put to use in social contexts) A central theme encapsulated all of these questions: alignment and articulation
Articulation (of people, programs, and places) - How might teacher educators improve ongoing relationships across cohorts, courses, instructors, and contexts in ways that better support the learning and living of teacher candidates and their students?
Engagement - How might teacher educators model what they believe about teaching, learning, and living in ways that engage teacher candidates in authentic and meaningful relationships with students, colleagues, disciplines, and the profession at large?
Language Links:
Student teachers have an unrealistic view of what it means to teach and to learn a world language
This positions preservice teachers to be vulnerable to instability and conditions habits of "thought and action" (Bird, 2008) that position them to function in a perpetual crisis survival mode
Pedagogically sound uses of wikis have the potential to reshape teacher candidates' images of teaching
Our wiki began as a response to two technical problems
Practices:
Agenda (students nominate items for it)
Collaborate on projects outside of class
Display student work
Just-in-time support via discussion forums
Increase time available in class by holding critical conversations in discussion forums
Organize activities in and out of class (convocation, swap shop, parties)
Participation in a broader community of users (and learn professionalism and confidentiality in posting)
Resource library
Transformations:
Affordances
Authentic audiences and purposes (literature from English/Language Arts)
Autonomy - Use for own purposes (Ryan & Deci)
Build community and leadership capacity (Lambert)
Concept map - Complex, dynamic visual representation of the mental models, perspectives, and schema of an expert in an ill-structured discipline (Spiro). When preservice teachers engage with it, it can help them map the field of language education and makes their understanding of conceptual links more explicit. Also demonstrates the complex, dynamic, multidimensional, multifaceted, relational nature of knowledge
Content Delivery - interactive (discussion boards), sensory (audio, animations, multimedia, ppt, videos), visual, autonomy (learner controls speed of delivery, which learning objects to interact with) (Meskill)
Exposure to multiple technologies and experience with use and integration for multiple purposes
Flexibility
Increases complexity - Resists oversimplification of a complex domain (Spiro)
Just in time support - for heavy cognitive and emotional load of internship
Control (recenters classroom authority and power dynamics)
Expert/novice (Potentially repositions them to participate more fully - Scaffolds their movement from periphery to increased participation)
Developmental appropriateness (start where students are)
Pedagogy, scaffolding
The Rationale:
Alignment of complex, multifaceted layers of content, structures, practices, and perspectives is critical in order to clear a pathway for learning
Collaborative - can edit content and structure as mental maps evolve, different from mere cooperation, takes a core community of trusted people to get there
Conversation
Participatory
Self-archiving (memory), but not permanent - mistakes okay
Sharing control
Simplicity
Social capital (gifts, transactions)
Social - relatedness, moves from periphery to core in scaffolded way
Subscription
Transparency
Trust
An alternative approach that positions students at the center of the learning experience (along with their agency, desires, interests, needs, and motivations), foregrounding relationships in the process, is needed.
Design - Active engagement in meaningful design and creation produces sufficient movement through time and space so that growth occurs. And this is the most powerful feature of the wiki—design, combined with authentic audiences and professional purposes.
Distributed cognition - in the wiki, in the students, in the wiki community, in the disciplinary worlds the wiki connects
Epistemological pathways - Experiences are powerful because they help us to move from individual pieces of content like a grammar point, a vocabulary word, or a cultural point, to curriculum by connecting them in ways that create paths for learning. As we connect these curricular paths to other disciplines, we suddenly have a dimensionalized space in which experiences can occur. I wasn’t creating connections, or even content. I was designing a learning environment! Creating a structure that was strong enough to support learning, but flexible enough to accommodate powerful experiences was tricky and required that I focus less on what I intended to teach and more on what I wanted students to learn. It is the experiences that students have within a learning environment, however, that produce the learning—not the structure or its pieces!
Flexibility - recentering, recontextualizing, and zooming in/out on different pieces of knowledge as a way of helping students to position themselves within a dynamic and constantly changing stream of information.
Growth as movement through time and space - Emphasize that knowledge is not static, and understanding “flows” like a current. Just as action on knowledge helps the learner to transform the knowledge from knowledge to understanding, action on understanding over time results in expertise (a.k.a. dimensionalized understanding). Underscore that the component of time is not enough to produce expertise. One must move THROUGH time AND across disciplinary spaces (a la Rand Spiro’s criss-crossing disciplinary landscapes).
Inquiry is an important part of their experiences, and I found that the wiki could be used to support it in multiple ways—from discussing projects, to providing tools, to displaying finished work.
Learning environments AS embodied knowledge
Motivation - Wikis have the potential for giving students soooo much feedback on their thinking and their work
Pedagogy - Technologies and other tools frequently used in classrooms affect the shape, flow, and ultimate content of “information dots,” “knowledge packages,” and “concept knots” (Ma, 1999).
Perspectives - It's about the perspectives that the wiki enables and facilitates and supports
Technologies as mediators of cognition
Wiki as product (external representation of internal mental models/schema), practice (mediator of cognition), and perspective (embodiment of teacher pedagogy)
The tools we use shape what it is possible for us to think and to understand in a very real sense
Issues for Further Consideration:
Must assess process, not just product (b/c product is a snapshot of students' development in time). How they navigate the process is a way of assessing their thinking/problem-solving
Epistemology:
Knowledge = accretive, collaborative, constructed, distributed, dynamic, relational, social
Epistemological pathways emerge as the result of the synergistic interactions between students and teachers, students and other students, students and content, and content and content.
Understanding arises from seeing things in their relations to other things.
Knowledge --> Building blocks of perspective
Perspectives --> Limit vision/perception
Vision/Perception --> Frames Attention
Technology is a tool for seeing
Expanded vision/perspective --> shifts what it is possible for us to think
Pedagogy:
Learning is:
Authentic audiences and purposes
Communities of practice
Constructivist
Inseparable from life
Responsive to changing environments
Serves others
Social
References
Bird, Tom. (2008). Chapter 5: Getting down to work in TE 301. Unpublished manuscript, Michigan State University.
This paper explores the use of a wiki as a tool for developing literacies that initiate, implement, and sustain transformative educational and social change in preservice teachers, world language methods courses, teacher preparation programs, and the K-12 schools they serve. The wiki became a mediating tool that drew my "technology pedagogical content knowledge" (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) into a single actionable frame, helping me to consider my students’ perspectives more carefully. It also spurred me to consider issues of curriculum, authority, access, ethics, knowledge, and power more critically in the process. The more we used the wiki, the more I found myself relinquishing power and authority, questioning my own pedagogy, and understanding how intimately related products, practices, and perspectives are in the development of professional identity. The experience transformed my teaching and what it was possible for my students to learn.
Note: This link will take you to a wiki created especially for classroom teachers that contains a multimedia summary of the major sections of this paper: World Language Wikis
This started off as a summary, but appears to have disintegrated into yet another parts pile. One day I'll come clean it up, but for now, enjoy the first few sections and then recognize that the rest are more or less an abandoned playground.
The Problem:
The Questions:
Background - What does it mean to be literate and why should world language educators care?
Changes - How are writing spaces changing?Definitions - What is a wiki?
Clarifications - How does a wiki differ from a website or a blog?
Functions - How do wikis work and what can language educators do with them?
Teacher Preparation - What do wikis have to do with world language methods courses?
Language Links - How might a wiki be used in a world language methods course?
Transformations - In what ways might the tensions inherent in wiki use highlight possible sites for the transformation of learning, teaching, and professional development?
Student Comments - What do teacher candidates think of working with a wiki?
Assessment - How might one use the interactive features of a wiki for assessment purposes?
References - Where might one go to further explore the use of wikis in world language education?
Resources - What resources will be most helpful to novices in creating wikis of their own?
Summary - What are the key points of this article?
Background:
Changes:
Definitions:
Clarifications:
Functions:
Teacher Preparation:
Language Links:
Transformations:
Affordances
Tensions/Transformations
Alters notions of:
The Rationale:
Conversation
Participatory
Self-archiving (memory), but not permanent - mistakes okay
Sharing control
Simplicity
Social capital (gifts, transactions)
Social - relatedness, moves from periphery to core in scaffolded way
Subscription
Transparency
Trust
Issues for Further Consideration:
Must assess process, not just product (b/c product is a snapshot of students' development in time). How they navigate the process is a way of assessing their thinking/problem-solving
Epistemology:
Knowledge = accretive, collaborative, constructed, distributed, dynamic, relational, social
Epistemological pathways emerge as the result of the synergistic interactions between students and teachers, students and other students, students and content, and content and content.
Understanding arises from seeing things in their relations to other things.
Knowledge --> Building blocks of perspective
Perspectives --> Limit vision/perception
Vision/Perception --> Frames Attention
Technology is a tool for seeing
Expanded vision/perspective --> shifts what it is possible for us to think
Pedagogy:
Learning is:
References
Bird, Tom. (2008). Chapter 5: Getting down to work in TE 301. Unpublished manuscript, Michigan State University.
Free Buttons. (n.d.). Blur metal. Freebuttons.com. Retrieved March 17, 2008, from http://www.freebuttons.com/index.php?page=freebuttons&buttonName=BlurMetal&color=3
Mishra, Punya, & Koehler, Matthew J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. The Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. Retrieved March 29, 2008, from http://punya.educ.msu.edu/publications/journal_articles/mishra-koehler-tcr2006.pdf